The Sam Gunn Omnibus (117 page)

“Oh yes he will,” Sam
insisted. “Somebody at Ceres has already given him our flight plan. Big George,
probably.”

“Sam,” I said patiently,
“you filed that flight plan with the IAA. They’ll tell Judge Meyers. She’ll
come out looking for you.”

“Yeah, but she’ll be
several days behind. By that time the IAA controllers’ll tell her we’ve
disappeared. She’ll go home and weep for me.”

“Or start searching for
your remains.”

He shot me an annoyed
glance. “Anyway, we’ll meet with Fuchs before she gets here, most likely.”

“You hope.”

His grin wobbled a
little.

I thought the most
likely scenario was that Fuchs would ignore us and Judge Meyers would search
for us, hoping that Sam’s disappearance didn’t mean he was dead. Once she found
us, I figured, she’d kill Sam herself.

IT WAS EERIE
out there in the Belt. Flatlanders back on Earth think
that the Asteroid Belt is a dangerous region, a-chock with boulders, so crowded
that you have to maneuver like a kid in a computer game to avoid getting
smashed.

Actually, it’s empty.
Dark and cold and four times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. Most of
the asteroids are the size of dust flakes. The valuable ones, maybe a few meters
to a kilometer or so across, are so few and far between that you have to hunt
for them. You can cruise through the Belt blindfolded and your chances of
getting hit even by a pebble-sized ‘roid are pretty close to nil.

Of course, a pebble could shatter your ship if it hit you with enough velocity.

So we were running silent, but following the flight plan Sam had
registered with the IAA. We got to the first rock Sam had scheduled and
loitered around it for half a day. No sign of Fuchs. If he was anywhere nearby,
he was running as silently as we were.

“He’s gotta be somewhere around here,” Sam said as we broke orbit and
headed for the next asteroid on his list. “He’s gotta be.”

I could tell that Sam was feeling Judge Meyers’s eager breath on the back
of his neck.

Me, I had a different problem. I wanted to get that message chip away from
him long enough to send a copy of it to Martin Humphries. With a suitable
request for compensation, of course. Fifty million would do nicely, I thought.
A hundred mill would be even better.

But how to get the chip out of Sam’s pocket? He kept it on his person all
the time; even slept with it.

So it floored me when, as we were eating breakfast in
Achernar’s
cramped little galley on our third
day out, Sam fished the fingernail-sized chip out of his breast pocket and
handed it to me.

“Gar,” he said solemnly, “I want you to hide this someplace where
nobody
can find it, not even me.”

I was staggered. “Why... ?”

“Just a precaution,” he said, his face more serious than I’d ever seen it
before. “When Fuchs shows up things might get rough. I don’t want to know where
the chip is.”

“But the whole point of this flight is to deliver it to him.”

He nodded warily. “Yeah, Humphries must know we’re looking for Fuchs. He’s
got IAA people on his payroll. Hell, half the people in Ceres might be willing
to rat on us. Money talks, pal. Humphries might not know why we’re looking for
Fuchs, but he knows we’re trying to find him.”

“Humphries wants to find Fuchs, too,” I said. “And kill him, no matter
what he promised his wife.”

“Damned right. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a ship tailing us.”

“I haven’t seen anything on the radar plot.”

“So what? A stealth ship could avoid radar. But not the hair on the back
of my neck.”

“You think we’re being followed?”

“I’m sure of it.”

By the seven sinners of Cincinnati, I thought. This is starting to look
like a class reunion! We’re jinking around in the Belt, looking for Fuchs.
Judge Meyers is on her way, with a complete wedding party. And now Sam thinks
there’s an HSS stealth ship lurking out there somewhere, waiting for us to find
Fuchs so they can pounce on him.

But all that paled into insignificance for me as I stared down at the tiny
chip Sam had placed in the palm of my hand.

I had it in my grasp! Now the trick was to contact Humphries without
letting Sam know of it.

I couldn’t sleep that night. We were approaching the second asteroid on
Sam’s itinerary on a dead-reckoning trajectory. No active signals going out
from the ship except for the short-range collision avoidance radar. We’d take
up a parking orbit around the unnamed rock mid-morning tomorrow.

I waited until my eyes were adapted to the darkness of the sleeping
compartment, then peeked down over the edge of my bunk to see if Sam was really
asleep. He was on his side, face to the bulkhead, his legs pulled up slightly
in a sort of fetal position. Breathing deep and regular.

He’s asleep, I told myself. As quietly as a wraith I slipped out of my
bunk and tiptoed in my bare feet to the cockpit, carefully shutting the hatches
of the sleeping compartment and the galley, so there’d be no noise to waken
Sam.

I’m pretty good at decrypting messages. It’s a useful talent for a con man,
and I had spent long hours at computers during my one and only jail stretch to
learn the tricks of the trade.

Of course, I could just offer the chip for sale to Humphries without
knowing what was on it. He’d pay handsomely for a message that his wife wanted
to give to Lars Fuchs.

But if I knew the contents of the message, I reasoned, I could most likely
double or triple the price. So I started to work on decrypting it. How hard
could it be? I asked myself as I slipped the chip into the ship’s main
computer. She probably did the encoding herself, not trusting anybody around
her. She’d been an astronaut in her earlier years, I knew, but not particularly
a computer freak. Should be easy.

It wasn’t. It took all night and I still didn’t get all the way through
the trapdoors and blind alleys she’d built into her message. Smart woman, I realized,
my respect for Amanda Cunningham Humphries notching up with every bead of sweat
I oozed.

At last the hash that had been filling the central screen on the cockpit
control panel cleared away, replaced by an image of her face.

That face. I just stared at her. She was so beautiful, so sad and
vulnerable. It brought a lump to my throat. I’ve seen beautiful women, plenty
of them, and bedded more than my share. But gazing at Amanda’s face, there in
the quiet hum of the dimmed cockpit, I felt something more than desire, more
than animal hunger.

Could it be love? I shook my head like a man who’s just been knocked down
by a punch. Don’t be an idiot! I snarled at myself. You’ve been hanging around
Sam too long; you’re becoming a romantic jackass just like he is.

Love has nothing to do with this. That beautiful face is going to earn you
millions, I told myself, as soon as you decrypt this message of hers.

And then I smelled the fragrance of coffee brewing. Sam was in the galley,
right behind the closed hatch of the cockpit, clattering dishes and silverware.
In a weird way I felt almost relieved. Quickly I popped the chip out of the
computer and slipped it into the waistband of the under-shorts I was wearing.

Just in time. Sam pushed the hatch open and handed me a steaming mug of
coffee.

“You’re up early,” he said, with a groggy smile.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I answered truthfully. That’s where the truth ended. “I’ve
been trying to think of where I could stash the chip.”

He nodded and scratched at his wiry, tousled red hair. “Find a good spot,
Gar. I think we’re going to have plenty of fireworks before this job is
finished.”

Truer words, as they say, were never spoken.

The three asteroids Sam had chosen were samples of the three different
types of ‘roids in the Belt. The first one had been a rocky type. It looked
like a lumpy potato, pockmarked with craterlets from the impacts of smaller
rocks. The one we were approaching was a chondritic type, a loose collection of
primeval pebbles that barely held itself together. Sam called it a beanbag.

He was saving the best one for last. The third and last asteroid on Sam’s
list was a metallic beauty, the one that some Latin American sculptress had
carved into a monumental history of her Native American people;

she called it The
Rememberer. Sam had been involved in that, years ago, I knew. He had shacked up
with the sculptress for a while. Just like Sam.

As we approached the
beanbag, our collision-avoidance radar started going crazy.

“It’s surrounded by
smaller chunks of rock,” Sam muttered, studying the screen.

From the copilot’s chair
I could see the main body of the asteroid through the cockpit window. It looked
hazy, indistinct, more like a puff of smoke than a solid object.

“If we’re going to orbit
that cloud of pebbles,” I said, “it’d better be at a good distance from it.
Otherwise we’ll get dinged up pretty heavily.”

Sam nodded and tapped in
the commands for an orbit that looped a respectful distance from the beanbag.

“How long are we going
to hang around here?” I asked him.

He made a small shrug. “Give
it a day or two. Then we’ll head off for The Rememberer.”

“Sam, your wedding is in
two days.” Speaking of remembering, I thought.

He gave me a lopsided
grin. “Jill’s smart enough to figure it out. We’ll get married at The
Rememberer. Outside, in suits, with the sculpture for a background. It’ll make
terrific publicity for my tour service.”

I felt my eyebrows go
up. “You’re really thinking of starting tourist runs out here to the Belt?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“I thought that was just
your cover story.”

“It was,” he admitted. “But
the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.”

“Who’s going to pay the
fare for coming all the way out here, just to see a few rocks?”

“Gar, you just don’t
understand how business works, do you?”

“But—”

“How did space tourism
start, in the first place?” Before I could even start thinking about an answer,
he went on. “With a few bored rich guys paying millions for a few days in
orbit.”

“Not much of a market,”
I said.

He waggled a finger at me.
“Not at first, but it got people interested. The publicity was important.
Within a few years there was enough of a demand that a real tourist industry
took off. Small, at first, but it grew.”

I recalled, “You started a honeymoon hotel in Earth orbit back then, didn’t
you?”

His face clouded. “It went under. Most of the honeymooners got space sick
their first day in weightlessness. Horrible publicity. I went broke.”

“And sold it to Rockledge Industries, right?”

He got even more somber. “Yeah, right.”

Rockledge made a success of the orbital hotel after buying Sam out, mainly
because they’d developed a medication for space sickness. The facility is still
there in low Earth orbit, part hotel, part museum. Sam was a pioneer, all
right. An ornament to his profession, as far as I was concerned. But that’s
another story.

“And now you think you can make a tourist line to the Belt pay off?”

Before he could answer, three things happened virtually simultaneously.
The navigation computer chimed and announced, “Parking orbit established.” At
that instant we felt a slight lurch. Spacecraft don’t lurch, not unless
something bad has happened to them, like hitting a rock or getting your
airtight hull punctured.

Sure enough, the maintenance program sang out, “Main thruster disabled.
Repair facilities urgently required.”

Before we could do more than look at each other, our mouths hanging open,
a fourth thing happened.

The comm speaker rumbled with a deep, snarling voice. “Who are you and
what are you doing here?”

The screen showed a dark, scowling face: jowly, almost pudgy, dark hair
pulled straight back from a broad forehead, tiny deep-set eyes that burned into
you. A vicious slash of a mouth turned down angrily. Irritation and suspicion
written across every line of that face. He radiated power, strength, and the
cold-blooded ruthlessness of a killer. Lars Fuchs.

“Answer me or my next shot will blow away your crew pod.”

I felt an urgent need to go to the bathroom. But Sam
stayed cool as a polar bear.

“This is Sam Gunn. I’ve been trying to find you,
Fuchs.”

“Why?”

“I have a message for you.”

“From Humphries? I’m not interested in hearing what he has to say.”

Sam glanced at me, then said, “The message is from Mrs. Humphries.”

I didn’t think it was possible, but Fuchs’s face went harder still. Then,
in an even meaner tone, he said, “I’m not interested in anything she has to
say, either.”